Selling an update to a client who is clinging to their ages-old Plone-site is only the first of many problems you face when it comes to updates. This talk is a collection of best-practices and lessons-learned during many migrations from "cosmetic designs-changes" that ended up in complete relaunches to "minor version upgrades" that ended up in large-scale coding-horrors. Audience-participation to trade tips and tricks is highly encouraged. Topics covered include: - Explaining reasons to upgrade to humans - Why almost everything is a relaunch - "What did you do to my pixel?" - Surviving design-upgrades - Content-Migration: Tools, Tactics and Troubles - When every feature becomes a bug - What can break? - What to migrate and what you might want to loose - How to keep your own developments upgrade-safe(ish) See a video of thetalk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qx0JALp3lQ

1. Philip Bauer
Starzel.de
Migrations
Upgrades
Relaunches
irc & github: pbauer
twitter: StarzelDe

2. "I'm not sure we can launch
without the preview-button."

3. Align Expectations
Communication and Project-Management

4. Update
Upgrade
Migration
Redesign
Rewrite
Relaunch

5. if len(terms) >= 2:
print("It's a relaunch!")

6. • Ease Development
• Cool new Features
• Learn new Things
Why devs want to upgrade

7. Selling migrations
• Design
• Functionality
• Usability
• Speed
• TinyMCE in IE9

8. Which will it be?
• What about the content?
• What about the design?

9. How to migrate
• Make a Plan
• Make generous Timeline
• Present Changes before they happen
• Know the Upgrade-Guide
• Migrate your Code
• Migrate Add-ons

10. • Lot‘s of Disk-Space
• /tmp
• Keep Original for Comparison
• Make Snapshots

11. Pittfalls

12. • Remove Customisations
• Cleanup Add-ons & Design
• Clear & Rebuild
• Copy DB to new Buildout

14. • Startup
• Fix all Errors
• Document
• Disable irrelevant stuff
• Remove obsolete stuff
• Work hard

15. • Migrate the DB
• Integrate Customisations
• Write Migration-Steps
• Automate almost Everything
• collective.upgrade
• ftw.upgrade

16. Test the Hell out of it

17. Add shiny new stuff

18. Repeat

19. Challenges and Pitfalls
• The customer
• Your big mouth
• Design
• Legacy
• Multilingual
• Relations

20. Lessons
• Bad Communication and PM kill Projects
• Every Case is different
• Every non-trivial Upgrade should be
approached as a Relaunch
• Don‘t experiment

21. Questions
• How do you estimate time & cost?
Philip Bauer
Starzel.de
irc & github: pbauer
twitter: StarzelDe